A few days ago I tweeted the following question: ” The 5 biggest franchises: bond, lord of the rings, star trek, star wars and harry potter. Do any other film series come close culturally?” I genuinely thought those were the five biggest franchises. Yesterday, though, I was made aware of something even bigger, but which I hadn’t bothered to take a second glance at: Marvel. Growing up, I was never into comic books, preferring prose, film and tv; so I suppose characters like spiderman and superman didn’t capture my imagination in the same way as Frodo Baggins, James Bond and captain Picard did. Yet, glancing at the Wikipedia entry on it just now, the Marvel universe is colossal. As a single fiction, it spans characters and worlds; it comprises many different stories, all intertwined. Here at last might be the new fascination I’ve long been looking for. It seems ripe for exploration; I’m curious about what people see in this set of superheroes that I’d previously dismissed as ”for kids”. Not only is it a departure for me in terms of plots and characters, but the base material – comic books – is entirely unexplored terrain, an art form I’d never even considered. The question now is, where to start. Apart from having seen X-Men, I know almost nothing about this labyrinthine set of interwoven fictions.